Mara couldn’t remember if there ever had been.

Caroline Warner looked dully around and thought, ‘Such a strange child.’ Color and life came slowly up from wherever they’d been buried. Immediately, a feeling that was not guilt but probably should have been welled up and Mara thought, ‘There might have been a better way to handle that.’īut it worked. In the darkness, the spreading stain looked uncomfortably like blood. Her mom jerked hard, spilling wine over her chest. Usually Mara was content to let important matters slide until her mother felt like being lucid, but tonight she was jet-lagged and worn out, so she reached in and gave the blackness inside her mother’s head a light slap. She was like this more and more often these days, whether or not anyone was around to see her. Caroline Warner was empty tonight, and so much bigger than the space her skin enveloped.

She wasn’t even remembering things, although there were plenty of photographs on the wall where her blank eyes rested. Just sat and stared at the wall and sipped her wine. She wasn’t aware that she had any friends at the moment. Mara paused, one hand on the banister, and looked back. Mara was tired and inclined to let her, but when she walked in and dropped her bags at the foot of the stairs, her mother said, “Your little friend sent you a letter,” and everything changed. The house looked empty from the street, but her mother was in, sitting in the front parlor with the lights off, working on her second bottle of wine.

Mara came home on a Wednesday with a mild sunburn and a bank receipt for eighty-three thousand dollars stuffed indifferently in the front pocket of her jeans. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the book is a work of fiction. This book is dedicated to my grandfather and to his habit of keeping books with such marvelously terrifying illustrations down on the bottom shelf where any little kid could read it.Īll rights reserved. Lee Smith is simply masterful in plot, pace, character, dialogue, setting, suspense, and mythology-in pure story-telling.” Lee Smith is writing what can only be called masterpieces in a genre that sorely needs them.” “I can’t remember the last time a book had so much power over me. “I have never cheered and hated a character so much in my entire novel reading life…I couldn’t put it down, I couldn’t stop reading it. “The imagination of this author…is impressive and addictive…I enjoyed this book tremendously.”

The Scholomance by R. Lee Smith